


Heroes

by hauntedjaeger (saellys), quigonejinn



Series: Heroes in the Sky [1]
Category: Firefly, Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-29 23:12:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1011219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger, https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raleigh Becket is a registered Companion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heroes

**Author's Note:**

> This fic fuses Pacific Rim characters onto Firefly plots. If you aren't OH YEAH THAT IS TOTALLY WHAT HAPPENED IN THE ONE WHERE NISKA KIDNAPPED MAL AND WASH familiar with the plots of most episodes of Firefly and the follow-up movie, this will read weird.
> 
> This fic also has: 
> 
> 1\. A lot of overheated speculation about why the future is ruled by Chinese speakers, but we never see anybody with a decent Chinese accent on the show and the Tams are the only crew members who looked like they could mixed-race Chinese. So yeah, this fic futzes with the specifically Chinese thing and extends it out to other traditional East Asian powers, because integration of Mako's Japanese background is something Pacific Rim did really well and I wanted to keep that. 
> 
> 2\. Tendo's kid as a girl.
> 
> 3\. Graphic violence and threats of rape and references to past bad things being done to children.
> 
> 4\. Failure to comply with the finer points of the Firefly extended universe.

Five minutes after they dock at New Europa Transport Hub, Stacker is moving through the airlocks and headed for the inner ring. He doesn't come back until six hours later. By then, Mako is fretting about the time surcharges they'll incur for every quarter-hour they overstay their scheduled departure time, charged on top of docking fees and gravlock fees and the air-share upcharge and money due to the tug that brought them in slow and will take their ship back out. She knows they're strapped for credits as it is, what with the surveyor and his wife breaking their lease early. 

Mako meets Stacker at the ramp, clipboard in hand, and He makes introductions. Mako considers this guy who doesn’t look like he could get work mopping floors on a long-haul freighter, let alone be a real registered -- 

_He's not what I expected_ , she says to Stacker. 

Raleigh Becket smiles. He says, in the cleanest, purest Japanese Mako has heard in years, _Better or worse?_

...

What language is spoken on the dusty frontier planets? Standard, by and large, mixed with pidgin Chinese for swearing. Across the Alliance and points beyond, the better educated the individual, the better the accent, the further the vocabulary extends beyond profanity, and the greater the likelihood of the speaker not only knowing Chinese, but also speaking one of the other great languages of the Central Planets. Sihnon and Londonium are the planets at the very heart of the Alliance, and on them, the higher the tower, the smaller the amount of Standard spoken on a day-to-day basis by the owners. Two-thirds of the great, private spaceships that left Earth-That-Was were chartered by trading families from three nations; for those who survived and went on to build the Alliance, retaining ancestral languages is a point of pride. A marker of distinction. 

Raleigh Becket is a registered Companion, enrolled and listed on Guild books as having completed his training at the Companion Madrassa on Londinium. He has a native's accent in three dialects of Chinese, plus fluency in Japanese. He knows enough enough Korean to be able to talk intelligently about literature and finance and politics and romance and sex.

Stacker comes back to _Jaeger_ with him. Raleigh Becket rents one of the shuttles. 

...

On Paradiso, after the train job, Raleigh arrives, full of the respectability and calm of his station. 

The men, he explains, with enormous dignity, are indentured servants with three years left on their debt. Six months will be added to their debt for this adventure. He fixes Stacker and Herc in turn with a disapproving look, then settles his hands back into his sleeves and smiles warmly at the sheriff. Herc raises his eyes to the ceiling and the sky beyond to call every god and saint and bodhisattva that has ever watched over soldiers to make Stacker hold his temper until they can get back to _Jaeger_.

...

 _Jaeger_ is a Firefly-class Series-4 transport, originally built in the dockyard on New Burbank on Osiris with final assembly on Hera. Eight people live on her. Raleigh Becket has the larger and more comfortable of the shuttles to himself; in the main body of the ship itself, it's Mr. Pentecost, Mako, the two Hansens, and the three Chois. 

"During the war, were you and Dad Browncoats?" Holiday asks her mother. They're down in the engine room, and Holiday has a study pad in her lap, loaded up with new lessons that Stacker picked up for her in the bazaar on New Europa Transport Hub. 

"Oh," Alison Choi says, blinking at her daughter for a long, long moment.

Then, she calls over her shoulder. "Did you hear that, Tendo? Your daughter thinks we were Browncoats." 

Tendo Choi looks up from the port compression coil he is fiddling with, then takes one look at his wife and daughter, realizes that Alison is not joking, and they both start laughing. Holiday is annoyed that everybody seems to find something funny without her; under the table, Max shifts in his sleep, then goes on snoring. 

...

Max is technically Chuck Hansen's dog, but early on, quickly after she starts learning to walk, he figures out that the Choi pup is a better source of dropped protein. 

...

What makes a would-be Companion stand out enough to become a guild member? Physical beauty, of course, but every year, stunningly beautiful trainees wash out, not only on the great Madrassas of the Central Planets, but even secondary ones like Ariel's. Granted, there was a basic requirement for athleticism and coordination. Aesthetic sense could be taught only to a point. Much more difficult, much more challenging, though, was finding trainees with the required degree of empathy. How many times did Raleigh use a brush to write, on a sheet of paper, while holding his sleeve, the old Chinese ideograms meaning: _True need cannot be satisfied in the absence of true understanding_. 

Both of the Becket boys had it. At the Madrassa at Londonium, second only to the one on Sihon itself, their natural gifts were refined, shaped, brought under control. Made into the core of their skills. 

...

If Stacker and Herc and Tendo and Alison weren't Browncoats, what were they during the war? Alliance. Stacker speaks good Mandarin and has supplemented his Japanese with instruction from Mako. Herc has a rougher accent in Mandarin and no Japanese, but he has a little Tagalog picked up while stationed at the Manila Orbital. 

One of Tendo's grandfathers was full Chinese from the towers of Sihnon. 

...

A wagon makes its way through a shallow river. Bandits appear. They make threats, and Herc considers them and narrows his eyes, but doesn't say anything. Then, one of the bandits makes a joke about how he'd be pretty quiet too, if his missus was so powerful ugly. 

There is a beat. 

"Herc, I'm not fooling anyone," the voice behind the bonnet says. It's distinctly and markedly not feminine, quite disgruntled, and the bandit who had made the comment about Herc's missus being _powerful ugly_ looks pained. Almost a little sorry for Herc, but Herc shrugs back at him, and in a single, coordinated movement, Stacker and Herc pull their guns. The bandits pull theirs. It's two against two, guns against guns, stalemate with Stacker still in a flowered bonnet. 

Then, Mako appears, as if by magic, from the side if the wagon. 

She has an Alison Choi-modified gun roughly the size of a shoulder-mounted cannon.

...

"The woman lays the wreath upon her intended."

Stacker blinks.

"And he drinks of her wine."

Stacker clenches his jaw. 

"And then there is a dance with a joining of hands." 

For a man who was in school to become a minister, Stacker looks horrified at hearing about the religious ceremonies of the settlers of Triumph. For his part, Herc looks a combination of stricken and amused. Mako looks concerned. Chuck looks disgusted. Tendo considers giving Stacker advice, as one married man to another, but decides that Holiday needs to grow up with both a father and a mother. 

Later, the woman makes her way to what she's learned are Stacker's quarters. She picks the lock, slips inside, looks around, and curses in remarkably good Chinese. 

...

The bed in Stacker's is for two; the dressers built into the bulkheads are for two. On the wall, in pride of place and held fast with brackets, there is a framed picture showing the captain and the older redhead man sitting at a table with a strange-looking cake in front of them. The frosting spells out HAPPY ANNIVERSARY. How did she misread things so -- 

"It was a good cake," Mako says, conversationally. 

Chuck racks the shotgun in her hands and keeps both barrels pointed squarely at so-called Saffron. "Awful frosting, though. I swear Alison makes it with with engine oil." 

"I heard that," the intercom says. Chuck winces, because he knows he is in for a week of his protein bars, and his protein bars only, being burned to a crisp in the warming tray. 

...

Stacker is the captain, and Herc is his right-hand man. How long have they been together? A long time. They aren't a couple for exchanging rings, but there are a pair in a box in the ship safe. Alison does weapons, cookery, and piloting when Chuck isn't in the seat. Tendo keeps them in the sky, and Raleigh provides them with steady fuel money and enough respectability to be allowed to approach a better class of space stations and planets. Max is responsible for drooling extensively on Holiday. 

Mako -- 

... 

First, over the course of a dozen years, Mako has slowly, steadily rebuilt large portions of Jaeger. "Firefly Series 4 out of the yards at Osiris, but she's one of a kind now," she tells Raleigh, patting the hull. 

Second, she acts as quartermaster and keeps the books. 

Third, she provides muscle. Surprised? One memorable Unification Day, Stacker, Herc, and Mako are in a pro-Alliance bar. Some goushi stands up and announces a toast to the sacrifices made by all of his brothers and sisters in the Alliance Corps. Stacker and Herc look at each other and come to a mutual, silent decision not to raise their glasses. The goushi comes by to demand that they do. Herc says, calmly, that he doesn't believe the man was ever in the Alliance Corps. Which unit? Which division? What battles did he fight? 

The man hesitates. "Lima Shatterdome, 34th Division, Red Body."

"Lima never had more than twenty-five divisions during the war," Stacker says, and Mako looks at the set, hard expressions on Herc and Stacker's faces, the way Herc's right fist is clenching and unclenching in anticipation of planting itself against a jaw. The faces of the man's friends are somewhat less set and hard faces of the man's friends. On the other hand, there are a good half-dozen of them, plus a barkeep that is not-so-subtly edging towards the part of the bar where she probably keeps a firearm. Consequently, Mako makes an executive decision: she throws her drink into the man's face. He roars, and before he can lunge for her or his friends even react, Mako is standing behind him, a gun pointed directly at a region south of his belt. 

"We're done here," Mako says, looking at Stacker and Herc. 

Stacker looks at Herc. Herc looks back at Stacker. They put down their drinks, and Mako covers them as the three of them walk out of the bar by the simple method of keeping her gun on the shitstain's crotch and dragging him after her. 

Thirty steps after the bar door, Mako turns the guy loose, but not before kicking him him between the legs, hard. 

He drops to the floor, howling, and half the bar comes surging out, yelling. Mako is laughing, and everybody runs like hell. 

...

So Mako grows up rough on the frontier. Her sense of humor looks a lot more like Chuck Hansen's, and she is, admittedly, different than she would be in other circumstances: Stacker does what he can. He tries to make sure that Mako keeps up with her Japanese, both written and spoken, bartering for vidink books or recordings of lectures and cultural entertainment from the Central Planets. He is a good man, and it helps that when they were Alliance officers together, he and Herc were a long, long way from being grunts in trenches. They both speak Mandarin; they both read Chinese. 

In fact, for Mako's eighteenth birthday, she gets a joint present from them. Mako keeps the books, so she knows they don't have money for the air cycling upgrade she's been itching for, and Stacker usually gets a pained look when she shows him pictures of the clothes that she wants to wear, but there's no doubting the class and taste of what they give her: Mako'smouth falls open when she gets the wrapping paper off. A small box, no bigger than her palm, simple, beautifully lined and proportioned, and richly colored, undeniably beautiful. Mako turns it left and right, watching how the layers and layers and layers of precious red-gold lacquer catch in the canteen lights. 

"Open it," Herc suggests, and the tone of his voice lets Mako know that the box was Stacker's present. The contents are Herc's part, and when she opens it, Mako's mouth falls open. 

"This was -- " Mako says, looking up. "Mr. Hansen, are you sure?" 

Like the box, the comb is small. Like the box, the workmanship is extraordinary: a decorative hair comb showing a heron in flight, wings back, legs trailing. Every tiny gold line is full of life, and the enamel, even after all these years, are exquisite. Mako takes the comb out, feeling a little unsteady. 

Herc leans forward. He is a little unsteady, too. He kisses Mako on the cheek. 

"Happy birthday, Mako," he says. 

...

Nevertheless, the underlying fact is that Mako grows up on a Firefly-class midsize transport vehicle that goes from dusty planet to dusty planet to trading orbital to transit hub. 

They make trading runs when times are good and have to look for income to supplement that when times are bad. They might be ex-Alliance officers, but two years before Mako's eighteenth birthday when Herc surprises everyone by giving Mako that beautiful box with Angela's comb inside, Stacker and Herc and Tendo are dirtside to collect payment for delivered cargo. The buyer decides that he does not want to actually pay for the goods and would rather take them, plus _Jaeger_. A half-dozen thugs show up on rolling stock to to attack a ship guarded, supposedly, only by two kids and a woman. The teenage boy tries to stop them and -- 

"I don't suppose you're going to want to let me in, pretty girl," one of the men says, smiling at Mako, taking two steps forward into the cargo bay with the big, wide expanse of the planet behind him. 

Face white, Mako looks at Chuck. His face is bloody. His arm is probably broken, but despite that, he is still struggling against the man who is dragging him by his other, non-broken arm. Chuck is trying to get his feet under him; Chuck is making small noises that are probably her name. Three men have guns on Mako; the one who called her _pretty girl_ takes another step forward, smiling in a disgusting way. He is almost within arm's reach, five feet away, four and a half feet away, still smiling and now actually starting to reach out and grab her --

Mako has a shotgun in her hands. They're depending on her not to have the resolve to use it. 

Consequently, in quick order, she racks it, blows a hole in the man who maybe an arm's length away from her, screams for Chuck to remember the plan, then hits the floor, making sure to bury her face in her arms: before all of what used to be a man's abdomen touches the cargo bay floor, Mako has triggered an homemade improvised explosive device. 

The explosion itself isn't so bad. 

The nails and shrapnel that fly out at chest height on an adult -- those are. 

...

"I'm not -- Mako, Chuck, you're insane -- you're _kids_ , you're -- "

It takes both of them to drag a very pregnant Alison into a storage closet, kicking and screaming and cursing them. They can still hear her on the other side of the door, but Mako locks it, kicks the key underneath down the hall, then turns to Chuck. 

"The bomb isn't ready," she says, hand on Chuck's arm. She knows her voice is shaking, and she doesn't know how much Alison can hear through the door. 

Chuck looks at her, and Mako sees his face change the moment he decides. "How long do you need?" he asks. 

Chuck and Mako are sixteen. 

...

Mako keeps the books. Mako provides additional muscle. Mako has also rebuilt significant parts of the ship. "She's one of a kind now," she tells Raleigh, and she walks Raleigh through the upgrades that make the shuttle worth top-dollar for someone in his line of work -- better cross-flow ventilation for guest comfort, upgraded double-core motion dampers for an easy ride in and out of atmo. 

"Heated bathroom mirrors," she says, flicking on the lights and pointing. "Towel warmers. Real Poseidon cultured stone on the vanity, with generous, lockable storage under the sink. Real tub with a seventy-five decaliter water tank that you can fill if you're willing to pay for freightage."

Mako pauses. Grins. "This is the nicest place to take a shit for three days travel in any direction." 

Raleigh winces. 

...

Mako -- 

...

One night, Raleigh is having trouble sleeping, so he walks down to the canteen and gets a little hot water: he can brew some up with his own kit, but it's a fancy rig, and he thinks the walk will soothe him: out of his door, through the quiet hallways, past the cubbyhole on the left that Mako calls her own and the cubbyhole that Chuck calls his. Past the door to the engine room, where he hears two distinct waves of snoring coming through the metal. Tendo and Max, maybe? The kitchen next, where he fills his mug with hot water. 

Then the medbay and armory, and Stacker and Herc's door is directly after that; Raleigh doesn't hang around there, partially to give them some degree of privacy, but partially, too, because there is a light at the far end of the ship from his shuttle. 

Mako is sitting in the pilot's chair, alone, with the starfield up on the display. She turns a little, sees it's him, and smiles. 

"When was the last time you saw the stars?" she asks. 

Raleigh smiles back at her and comes to stand next to her. There is another chair in the bridge,. Mako offers it to him, but Raleigh says he'd prefer to stand. More comfortable that way, and he tells Mako that when he was a kid and felt small or alone, he would look up at the stars and wonder what was out there. 

Mako leans back in the pilot's chair -- it's scaled and sized for Chuck, so she doesn't quite fit in it, but she seems comfortable enough. 

"I grew up on this ship," she says. "This is home. _Sensei_ spent years trying to keep me from following him dirtside or onto stations. When I think of stars, this is what I see." 

So that Raleigh can get the real effect of the upgraded display she installed, Mako switches the lights off on the bridge, and in the half-dark of the artificial starfield, Raleigh considers Mako's face. He studies the way it shows pride and love and the bittersweet memory of whatever experience it was that convinced Stacker she should be allowed to follow him off the ship -- holding the mug in both hands, Raleigh half-bows to offer Mako some of the hot water in his mug. 

Without entirely knowing why, Mako half-bows back and accepts the mug from him with both hands. She drinks, carefully, on the opposite side of the mug from him. She gives it back to Raleigh. They split the hot water, sip by sip, handing the mug between them, two handed each time. 

Stars flow past. 

...

Raleigh considers, but does not actually ask, questions about how a Marshal of the Alliance ended up on the frontier with an adopted daughter whose hair color and eye color and face structure and and accent and social instincts would, in any civilized setting, mark her as being from one of the great corporate clans that control the towers of Sihon and Londonium. It was a point of pride that they kept their power and wealth without having to marry out: they wanted to look the way they did on Earth-That-Was. It was a visible sign of power and prestige.  
Raleigh doesn't know when he heard of an outsider being allowed to adopt anyone who even looked like Mako. The clans took care of their own. 

Is Mako Mori even her real name? 

Raleigh sees clients, works on the settled edge of the frontier. 

...

One night, in fact, around the canteen table, it's Mako's turn to tell a funny story, so she offers up the time she got Stacker and Herc out of a bar fight on Unification Day by putting a shotgun to a drunk liar's balls. Then, she got them out of the bar. When they were far enough away, she kicked the drunk liar in the balls and ran. Everybody ran, in fact, and Mako and Chuck are laughing hard enough that they can barely get the words out. Stacker has a patient, long-suffering look on his face. Herc looks torn between amusement and horror, and Alison comes out from the galley with a frosted protein cake because it's Chuck's birthday. 

"Come on, old man," Mako says, nudging Chuck in the side with her elbow. "Blow out the candles, or we'll have a fire on our hands."

A few minutes later, fire comes boiling from the engine: a blown port compressor coil, the engine is shot, and Herc is unconscious on the floor. Will they freeze to death, or will they run out of oxygen before that? 

...

Instead, what happens is this: when it's cold enough on the ship that breath hangs in the air and Holiday is shivering under a battery-operated thermal blanket and everyone is dizzy, nauseous from the lack of oxygen, Stacker divides them into two groups. The Chois will go with Raleigh in his shuttle. It's better-equipped and safer. Mako will go with the Hansens in the other shuttle. 

"Staying behind alone will kill you," Mako says, pulling Stacker to the side. "Let me stay with you."

There is silence, and Stacker considers her face, the dark eyes, the set jaw. 

"You're a brave girl," he says. "I need you to protect -- " 

The name can't quite come to his mouth. 

"He's hurt," Stacker says, finally. With her lips pressed together tightly, Mako shakes her head, and she turns away a little, as if to tell Chuck that she is staying, but Stacker touches her with two fingers under the chin, so that she'll look at him. 

There are tears in her eyes; there are tears in Stacker's, too. Stacker straightens his shoulders. 

Taking a deep, shaky breath, the tears running freely on her cheeks now, Mako straightens her shoulders to reflect his. 

...

"You didn't order _me_ not to come back," Herc says. 

"You were unconscious," Stacker says, breathing out from around the bandages. "Didn't think I had to give you orders." 

The ship hums underneath them; Mako is sitting on Stacker's left, and Herc is sitting at Stacker's right. Down at the end of the medbay, Raleigh is giving them a moment of privacy by pretending to look over his stores -- no questions about how a Madrassa-trained Companion also happens to know a decent amount of battlefield surgery, and through the open door into the hallway, Stacker sees Holiday tear past, dragging the battery-operated electric blanket behind her like a silver cape with Max in waddling pursuit. 

Stacker breathes out, slowly. Mako is holding Stacker's one hand with both of her own, and moving slowly, gingerly because of the bandages, he kisses her on the forehead. Then, Stacker reaches over his free hand and takes Herc's left hand. Herc has his right arm in a sling. 

Stacker kisses Herc, carefully, on the mouth. 

...

A friend of Raleigh's asks for help, and Raleigh pays Stacker the equivalent of three months rent for the shuttle, half up front, half afterwards, to help her. The friend runs a bordello on a frontier planet -- one of her girls is pregnant, and man with power in the local community thinks it's his. He's sworn to use physical force to get what he thinks belongs to him, but Mako and Chuck have a lot of experience defending positions against heavy odds. In the end, Rance Burgess is on his knees, calling out for Petaline to bring him his son. After a delay, Petaline comes out, gun in one hand, baby in the other, and she introduces them formally. This is her son, Jonah. Jonah, this is daddy. 

The world is a poor one, so it's dry. Dust hangs in the air. Raleigh puts a gun in Petaline's hand, and she shoots Rance Burgess while he is on his knees on the ground. 

"I'm sorry about your friend," Mako says, afterwards, softly. They're speaking Japanese and sitting together in the bridge with the stars streaking past. Mako hands the mug of tea back to Raleigh, and they're splitting it, handing it back and forth between them as if it was eggshell porcelain and they were old friends on Sihnon, sitting in a garden with stones and trees and carefully sculpted water. 

"She was a friend of Yancy's," Raleigh says quietly. 

...

How does Chuck Hansen feel about Mako Mori and Companion Raleigh Becket sitting on the bridge at night, speaking Japanese to each other, drinking out of the same mug? Mako certainly isn't making a face at Raleigh's pronunciation or correcting his grammar, but on the other hand, Chuck certainly feels better about it than, say, if -- 

...

"This is Aunt Tamsin," Holiday informs Raleigh. They're standing in the hallway next to the canteen, Holiday in his arms and pointing to a picture of a woman with bright red dyed hair and piercings around the eyebrows and mouth. "She used to travel with us, until she got too sick, so she went to live on a planet. Then she died." 

"So I hear," Raleigh says. They're in dock at the Honolulu Transit Station, and Raleigh is on babysitting duty while everyone else is down in the official offices, filling out paperwork for clearance to go planetside. Stacker and Mako need to pick up Tamsin's ashes. 

Holiday goes on studying Raleigh with wide brown eyes. Her hair is fine and slightly curly, like Alison's. 

"You smell nice," Holiday says. 

"I'm going to see a client later," Raleigh says. 

"Does that mean you're going whoring?" Holiday asks. "Chuck says that if you and your whoring Central Planet cup-sharing ways come between him and Mako, he'll drop you like a sack of Browncoat rebel shit." 

In the silence that comes after that, Holiday wriggles to indicate she wants to be let down to the floor, so Raleigh puts her back down. 

...

They need clearance to go planetside for Tamsin's ashes, and at some point, the sequence of stamp-obtaining and permit-purchasing and subtle palm-greasing, somebody missed a step: now, unless they get a dispensation, it's back to the start, another set of slow and expensive stamp-obtaining and permit-purchasing and subtle palm-greasing. Since they're docked on the Transit Station, the ship follows local time; when Chuck wakes, it's still quiet, still hushed, but he comes back from the canteen to find Raleigh and Mako standing in the passageway. 

"I thought you wanted to get approval for planetside. You don't have to just obey him." 

"It's not obedience, Becket," Mako says. "It's -- " 

...

"Miss Mori, may I come in?" 

"A long time ago, I made you a promise." 

The crew of the Jaeger has run into a dead end trying to get approval to go to the planet, get Tamsin's ashes, and scatter them from the place she asked. Stacker's yelling, Herc's quiet intimidation, Chuck's loud intimidation, Mako's combination of bribery and hard-eyed conveyance of the imminent possibility of violence -- none of it worked, but while tangled in the sheets with his client for the night, sweat cooling on both of their backs, Raleigh says that some friends of his have run into difficulties getting permission to go planetside for personal business. What would be the best way to get around that difficulty? 

A meeting with the governor, the man says, easy with pleasure. Does Raleigh want an invite to the party tomorrow night? 

...

So: tomorrow. 

So: approaching night. 

Mako sits on the edge of her bed, and Raleigh lines her eyes in blue to match the streaks of blue now in her hair: Mako came out of the bathroom a little awkward, not quite sure of the look, but Raleigh will be wearing official Companion robes, and Mako is wearing gray slacks and black boots that Raleigh found in the secondhand clothing bazaar on the Transit Station, a black jacket from the same source, disassembled by Raleigh and Herc over the the course of the afternoon cycle, adjusted, then reassembled. Mako pointed out that this didn't strike her as being fancy enough for going to the governor's palace to convince him to issue a dispensation for _Jaeger_ to go planetside, especially if she is going to be standing next to Raleigh. 

Raleigh smiles and says that nobody will be looking at him. 

Mako blinks. Then, Raleigh brings out the case of lip paint. He holds up the color that will, he thinks, work best. He holds it up against first Mako's skin, then his. Mako blinks even more slowly. 

She straightens her shoulders and takes a deep breath. 

...

First, Raleigh lays down a foundation coat on both of their mouths. 

Then, he paints Mako's mouth, carefully, in a specific way, using specific brushstrokes angled just so. He tells her not to press her lips together to blot. Instead, when the paint has dried to just the right degree, he leans forward and presses his mouth against hers, holding it just long enough for the right amount of color transfers over. The paint smells waxy; Raleigh smells -- intoxicating. Mako tries not to breathe deep, and when they're done, Raleigh checks it in the mirror. He likes the effect, because he smiles at himself, and suddenly every molecule of Mako is deeply, deeply aware of many things. It isn't just how painfully beautiful Raleigh is, even though he hasn't put official robes on yet and is just wearing the trousers and blue sweater that he wears around the ship, but also that these are her quarters. This is her bed. The door is closed, and Raleigh is kneeling on the ground, studying the way her mouth looks on his mouth. Mako's heart hammers away inside her chest, beating so hard it feels painful. 

Raleigh would, she thinks, sleep with her if she wanted him to. He wants to have sex with her. It's only -- 

"All those years I spent living in the past," Raleigh says, softly, putting down the mirror and looking away. 

He hasn't appeared in public, he says, wearing formal Companion robes since Yancy died. 

...

At the governor's, they are announced as Lady Mako Mori and Raleigh Becket, Companion. Mako wears gray and black; Raleigh is in blue that is the same color as the streaks in Mako's hair. 

The paint on his mouth is in the shape of Mako's mouth.

...

Fifteen minutes after the beginning of the planetside business day on Honolulu, permits for _Jaeger_ to land planetside arrive. Any public lands on the planet are open to them as a landing site; if there are any difficulties with local enforcement, they should be directed to contact the Governor's personal aide at this number. Tendo reads over the letter with its authentication code at the bottom and whistles. 

"Well, how about that, Becket boy," he says. "You charmed the hell out of _someone_." 

Raleigh is leaning against the wall, back in his usual blue sweater and trousers. He has a mug of tea in his hand that he is drinking from. 

"Wasn't me," he says, grinning. 

Tendo turns around in the chair, eyebrows up. 

...

Honolulu is not a poor planet: the people who settled it could afford to find a planet with the capacity to support and generate large quantities of water. The planet has oceans; the greenery is lush and wet, tropical. Holiday has never been to a tropical planet before; Mako and Chuck don't think they've been either, but Tendo reminds them about the time they went to Poseidon. 

Holiday darts ahead on the footpath up the hill, chasing the first real butterfly she has ever seen, and Alison starts to call her back, but Stacker tells her it's all right. 

"Let her," Stacker says. 

Alison opens her mouth to argue with him, then smiles, a little sadly. "Tamsin."

"Tamsin," Stacker says, smiling back in the same way. . 

So they go up the hill that way: Holiday running first, then Stacker and Mako, Herc and Chuck, Tendo and Alison and, when her legs get tired, Holiday. Raleigh brings up the rear, and at the great, flat stone at top with the hill, Stacker and Mako take turns pouring out ashes in horizontal lines and letting the wind blow them away into the sea. It's a beautiful view, with dark green trees stretching down to a blue sea and blue sky. 

The wind is strong, and Tamsin's ashes blow away quickly. 

...

"Right before I turned thirteen, Aunt Tamsin got too sick to stay. She had her Alliance pension, so she got residency planetside." 

Raleigh and Mako are together on the bridge during a night-cycle. The mug of tea is empty, but Mako is still holding it in both hands, and Raleigh leans against a spare bit of bulkhead next to the pilot's chair. The lights are half-on; the starfield is up. They provide just enough light so that Raleigh can make the lines and shape of Mako's face, but not the streaks of blue that she decided to keep even after they left Honolulu. Now, they're in orbit over Ariel, and Stacker and Herc are at the transit station, making some kind of deal for them to transport medical goods. 

A loud noise down at the end of the central hallway makes them turn together and look: Mako and Raleigh turn and see Chuck rattling back up the stairs from engineering. Standing in the brighter light of the hallway, how much can he make out? Probably Raleigh standing in the bridge. Definitely the angling of the pilot's chair. Maybe the shine of Mako's boots, propped up on the console next to him. Probably not Raleigh's hand on the armrest of the hair, half an inch from Mako's fingertips. 

Chuck watches them for a moment, then bangs into his quarters across the hall from Mako's: the next morning, before Stacker and Herc are back, when Raleigh is onto his way to the canteen for breakfast before heading out on the shuttle, he hears Chuck and Mako fighting in Chuck's room. The door is open, so he can hear them before he can see them. 

" -- you and him are a goddamn disgrace," Chuck says. 

"And you are a miserable excuse for a human," Mako says back. 

Raleigh pauses at the door; Chuck stares to let him know that he's not welcome, and Mako turns around eventually, anger in every line of her body. Raleigh sees her face shift a little on seeing him: she shakes her head, just a little, the blue shifting around her jaw, so Raleigh moves on. He sits down in the canteen across from Tendo, who is absorbed in reading a technical communique that came in overnight and therefore letting Holiday listen, raptly, to Chuck ask Mako whether she's ever considered what a selfish bitch she is and how she needs to be on a goddamn leash. Mako tells Chuck, in turn, that at least she isn't a constant reminder to her father that he made the wrong choice. 

Things deteriorate further from there. 

...

"Not enough for two," a man says. 

...

For Raleigh, the choice is between living in the past and starting to think of the future. 

For Mako, this choice is between Chuck and Raleigh. 

For Herc Hansen -- 

...

"I think this is not enough for two," a man says to Herc Hansen. 

...

The job after Honolulu, Stacker and Herc pick up a job transporting medication, and they take the _Jaeger's_ cut in kind -- on the frontier, in the normal course, they can sell the medication for more than they would've gotten in credits. In the normal course, Stacker and Herc would handle the sale of the cut. This time, Chuck asks to go on the actual exchange of goods for credits planetside. He is, he says, fucking sick of being stuck on the ship. The undercurrent is that he doesn't want to see Mako's goddamn face, and Herc looks at Stacker and shrugs. He's fine with his son going. Chuck's a big kid, knows what to do if things get ugly. 

Two hours after Raleigh sees the councilor off, four hours past when Stacker and Chuck are due back, Mako and Tendo and Herc take Raleigh's shuttle planetside: Mako identifies the 54-R sniper rifle shots in the bodies left in the sand. Tendo spots the fast-burn rocket burn marks. 

All three of them can see the Skyplex, hanging in the desert sky. 

They get back to _Jaeger_ , and Herc collects all of their ready cash on hand. Mako empties out the safe. 

"Wait a reasonable amount of time," Herc says to Tendo, closing up the leather bag. "If you don't hear back, take _Jaeger_ out of this quadrant." 

He turns to look at Mako. 

Mako hasn't said a word since coming back aboard the ship. She doesn't say a word then, either. 

...

"That's five times what you paid for the train job," Herc says. "We returned that money, too." 

Niska looks in the bag and tests the thickness of the currency packs, considers the size of the bills. His eyebrows arch, and he smiles, almost pleasantly. "Yes, you have had, you say, good times. I see that."

"Should be more than enough to buy them back." 

"They are perhaps damaged now -- are they worth so much to you?

Herc reacts just enough for Niska's smile to get broader. 

...

There is another universe where Niska wants to play this game. The person in Herc's position cuts him off halfway through the sentence: she points to her husband. 

Herc Hansen is not that person. He has been in this position before, and Niska knows it. There was press about it during the war, after all. There are few men named _Hercules Hansen_ on the frontier, and Niska would have had a different script, maybe, if Mako had come through the airlock. Now, Niska's eyes gleam. The room is small and close. Herc can smell the blood and burned flesh, and the floor is dark with old stains.

Stacker and Chuck are lashed to opposite sides of the tower by their wrists and ankles. Which one of them said _no_ when Herc came into the room? 

"Well, Mr. Hansen?" Niska asks. 

...

Mako meets Herc at the shuttle ramp and helps him get Chuck into the ship itself. He is weak in the knees and bleeding, clearly dazed, but flinches when Mako tucks her shoulder under his left arm and lifts some of the load. He recognizes her, and he starts to say, in a broken voice, that he is sorry. He knows she would have picked Stacker. This close to Chuck, with maybe a third of his weight on her shoulders, Mako can smell the singed skin, the burned flesh and hair. Chuck goes on apologizing, and Mako looks over at Herc on the other side: she hasn't said a word since coming back aboard the ship. 

She doesn't say a word then, either. 

Herc gives Raleigh the wrapped-up piece of Stacker's ear, along with instructions to keep it in the chilled compartment in the medbay. 

...

Years before, Stacker made Mako a promise: he would keep her safe. He would raise her as his own. 

Years before, a faction opposed to the Corps smuggled a dirty bomb onto the Ariel Shatterdome and announced that the Corps had forty-five minutes to evacuate everyone they could. Get out what you can. Rescue who you can. _Make choices, as we had to make, when you nuked us._

"Vengeance is an open wound," Stacker has told both Herc and Mako many, many times through the years. 

...

Raleigh opens the kit and swears under his breath. "Half of this is illegal."

"Left over from the last separatist war. Dad saved it for an emergency," Chuck says, and Raleigh looks up. 

Between coming aboard and showing up in the infirmary, Chuck showered and put on new clothes that looked a lot like his old ones before Niska: gray shirt, trousers, same boots as before. He smells like the cleaning liquid that Mako buys in bulk for the crew -- water is heavy and takes valuable space that could be saved for cargo, and Raleigh's shuttle carries the only supply of it for bathing on board _Jaeger_ , so the char smell is less, but not gone. Raleigh cleaned the wound on Chuck's shirt. Then Chuck took his shirt off, and Raleigh did what he could for the cuts and burns from where the alligator clamps bit into Chuck. 

In the room across the hallway, Mako and Herc are in the armory, laying out the ship's complement of hand weapons. 

Chuck sees Raleigh looking over his shoulder and through the door.

"You know how we had to get her out of the Central Planets?" he asks. 

Raleigh nods, so Chuck says. "Did you guess?" 

This time, Raleigh shakes his head. "We talked about it." 

Something ugly moves over Chuck's face, but it goes quickly. "So she'll be fine. And she'll bring Stacker will back." Chuck says. "You'll have what you want." 

Raleigh looks one more time over Chuck's shoulder: Herc is saying something to Mako, too low for Raleigh to hear. Mako says something back, and Herc hands her grenades. Down in the cargo bay, Tendo is jerry-rigging something that will equalize pressure in the airlock and let them into the ship. Down in engineering, Alison is putting together the bomb that Chuck will carry into the Skyplex and lay down as close to the engine as he can, so that Niska won't be able to blow _Jaeger_ out of space on the way out. 

Raleigh turns back to Chuck. 

"Turn your head," Raleigh says. 

Wordlessly, Chuck does, and Raleigh uses his right hand to angle Chuck's head properly, in order to expose the muscles he'll be injecting into: the first needle goes in smooth and steady. So does the second. Raleigh watches the heart monitor and sees the heart rate spike, hears Chuck gasp and flush when the first wave of drugs hit. How did the Alliance keep their soldiers alive and awake and functioning during trench battles that stretched for days, weeks without reinforcements, sometimes with food or sleep or rest? Raleigh doesn't know what the Browncoats used, or whether they even had anything, but the standard Alliance cocktail is a first wave of stimulants to force wakefulness and alertness. The second wave wave dulled pain and kept a soldier moving through anything short of catastrophic injury. Old soldier slang called the first _Courage_ and the second _Shadow_. 

After the war, they found their way into civilian recreational usage, and it's a long, long moment before Chuck can talk. Eventually, though, Raleigh watches the color slowly come back into Chuck's face. The drugs put a strain on Chuck's heart, but he is young. Strong. As his system adjusts, the color in his face adjusts, starting from around the mouth and spreads outward. Hand still on Chuck's jaw, Raleigh watches the pain and fear disappear. Is it the drugs? Or do they give Chuck the strength to fight them down? 

Raleigh considers Chuck for a long moment, and Chuck looks back at him, eyes rimmed with red, mouth steady, shoulders back. 

... 

How old is Chuck? Twenty-one? Same age as Mako. A couple months younger, even, at least going by the birthday listed for her in the shipboard records and her Alliance passport. 

...

Here is what Mako tells Raleigh one night when they're on the bridge together and the ship is dark and quiet and the stars are streaking by on the viewscreen: when she was young, her parents died in a shuttle crash. Her father's family had a tradition from Earth-That-Was barring women from carrying on the family business, and her father defied family orders to have another child -- having Mako had almost killed her mother, and he refused either to divorce her or a take a second wife. Mako looks out at the starfield; Raleigh doesn't need to be told that some of the old clans on the Central Planets have gone back to even older ways. 

Consequently, after her father died, what use was Mako? They put her in a program being developed for the government. It changed her, made her different, and Mako doesn't remember clearly anymore, but she met Mr. Pentecost, and Mr. Hansen and Tendo and Alison smuggled her out of the Central Planets in a secret compartment in the engine room. 

Mako Mori is probably not the name she had from her parents. 

...

When they go into the Skyplex, Mako takes point. Herc follows, telling her which way to turn and calling shooters. Chuck is last. Running on Courage and Shadow, eyes red, cheeks pale except for two spots of red, shotgun in hand, he pilots _Jaeger_ in while flying blind and powerless for thirty minutes after firing the thruster. Then, when they're moving through the Skyplex, he carries the bomb on his back: front-carry would be safer, but they're moving fast. He has more mobility this way, and he can pivot to shoot. 

At the airlock, Tendo and Alison stand at the airlock with shotguns, and on his shuttle, with everything prepped for emergency decoupling and launch, Raleigh holds Holiday in his lap. She plays with a set of ornamental hair pins from when he wore his hair long: they're worth more than the rest of the ship put together. 

...

The first guard makes a noise; Mako breaks his neck and leaps for the second, putting a knife hilt-deep in his throat. There is blood, and Mako pulls the handgun from his waist, a heavy, ornate, gangster's weapon. It looks ridiculous in her hand, but moving in the opposite direction and firing over her shoulder, she uses three shots to drop three more guards. Herc signals to the left. Wordlessly, Mako tosses the handgun to Chuck, who catches it by the grip panel, tucks it into the waist of his pants, then turns and rolls a smoke grenade down the hallway in the direction of oncoming footsteps. 

They turn left and take another guard station. 

Herc gets a man who leans out too far over in an effort to shoot Mako. On the ground, Mako tucks and rolls and comes out underneath the feet of guards who were not expecting her to move so quickly and thought a break in gunfire meant a break for them. She shoves the butt of her shotgun into the face of the first, then tosses it aside. She is out of shells, and while the guard stumbles backward, clutching at his nose, the other grabs for her. Mako stabs him in the bicep with her remaining short knife. He shrieks, and Mako kicks his feet out from under him. When he is down, she brings the heel of her boot down, hard, with frightening power and precision, on his throat. There is crunching noise. 

Herc uses a hand signal to indicate _straight ahead_. Smoke drifts through the corridors. 

...

At the next guard station, one of the guards has enough training to make a fight of it, briefly, with Mako. 

She comes in for a hard strike to his solar plexus, but he catches her by the shoulder and elbow. She shifts to throw him off balance and take him to the floor, but he moves with Mako and turns her momentum into her right shoulder: there is a ripping noise, and Mako screams, but manages to swing one leg around. In order to avoid getting taken down and put on the floor, where his height and reach will do him a lot less good, the guard lets go. In fact, he turns and runs, and useless right arm notwithstanding, Mako starts after him.

Herc catches her by her good arm. 

"Miss Mori," he says, very quietly, with most of the sound being lost in the sound of Chuck laying down covering fire. 

She turns to him, face white underneath a smear of blood on her cheek. She blinks at him. Herc doesn't let go of her elbow, but he also doesn't add _More control _, like Stacker would have.__

__Instead, Herc draws the knife from his belt and folds the fingers of her left hand around it._ _

__The three of them go down the last hallway, Mako still holding point and finally starting to breathe fast._ _

__..._ _

__Raleigh puts Courage and Shadow into Chuck's veins: they keep Chuck moving in the Skyplex hours after being tied down and tortured. Courage and Shadow were first synthesized for the last round of separatist war. Crude compared to the latest generation of battle stimulants. Nevertheless: necessary first steps for the work done at the Academy that Mako's family knowingly sent her to._ _

__Later, back on _Jaeger_ , she takes off her shirt, and Raleigh sees the lines of scars on her back. The most recent are a decade old; they stretched as Mako grew. _ _

__Chuck kisses her left shoulder and looks at Raleigh sitting on her other side._ _

__..._ _

__"Mr. Pentecost? You died, Mr. Pentecost."_ _

__..._ _

__"I want two days, at least. Minimum. I think many people know the name Stacker Pentecost, former officer of the Alliance Corps. Many know he crossed Niska. They must know what happens after that."_ _

__When they come through the door, Niska is on the floor, beaten bloody and trying to crawl away. Stacker is struggling with the torturer, and Herc doesn't hesitate to advance, firing on the torturer until he falls into the processing shaft._ _

__On the floor of the torture chamber, Niska looks up at Chuck and Mako. Blood is starting to run from Chuck's nose; his eyes are veined and red from neural overload. He still has the bomb strapped to his back._ _

__Mako's right arm hangs next to her. She still has Herc's knife in her left hand._ _

__..._ _

__"What is there to say?" Stacker tells Raleigh, looking up from the mirror in the medbay and checking the stitch work and ear. "Have you heard of paxilon hydrochlorate?"_ _

__Raleigh shakes his head._ _

__"The Alliance used it on a planet on the border called Miranda. The goal was behavior modification, but we killed millions and turned the survivors into Reavers."_ _

__"I've heard of Reavers."_ _

__Stacker closes his eyes, and Raleigh studies the face reflected in the mirror. Tired. Worn. Eventually, Stacker opens his eyes again and says, quietly, "To fight monsters, we created monsters of our own."_ _

__"You mean Mako?"_ _

__Stacker is still facing the mirror. He shakes his head._ _

__..._ _

__For years, Mako was terrified of anyone wearing gloves._ _

__..._ _

__"Chuck says that if you and your whoring Central Planet cup-sharing ways come between him and Mako, he'll drop you like a sack of Browncoat rebel shit."_ _

__The only water aboard the ship is on Raleigh's shuttle; he generally saves it for clients, but after Stacker and Herc and Mako and Chuck come back, he offers it up to them. A hot bath? Herc and Stacker gratefully decline and go back to their quarters after medical check and after Raleigh uses the dermal regenerator to re-attach Stacker's ear; Mako and Chuck take him up on offer, though. Chuck goes first, filling up the tub, splashing around. Mako and Raleigh sit in the main living area of the shuttle; Raleigh makes tea, and they talk about one of the scrolls he has on the wall: two cranes standing in front of a grove of bamboo. Eventually, the door opens, and Chuck comes out, wrapped in a towel from the waist down. Mako goes in, but she and Chuck pass each other. Raleigh sees the look that goes between them._ _

__So: Mako goes to the bathroom. Chuck stands there, towel around his waist, eyes still a little red from the battle stimulants, but he isn't so dead-pale. The hot water from the bath brought color back into his cheeks, and Raleigh ran over him with the medical examination equipment. Heartrate returning to normal. Blood pressure normalizing._ _

__"Come on," Chuck says to Raleigh, after a long moment of silence._ _

__Raleigh looks down at the cup in his hands, the tea service neatly laid out on the table. For the sake of politeness, Mako didn't drain her cup before going in, and Raleigh doesn't drain his, either. He sets his cup next to Mako's, then follows Chuck into the bathroom._ _

__..._ _

__They go in, and Mako is sitting on the edge of tub. Chuck sits on her left; Raleigh sits on her right. They watch as she takes off her shirt. The guard in the Skyplex tore a tendon in her shoulder badly, but Raleigh isn't surprised that by the time she came back to _Jaeger_ it was half-healed already. Two hours later, she can lift her right arm -- awkwardly, but she can lift it. Behavioral modification and training weren't the only things done to her, and when she takes off her shirt, Raleigh sees the scars running down her spine, large enough on a grown adult. What did they look like on a child? Chuck kisses her left shoulder. Slowly, deliberately, Raleigh kisses her right. _ _

__When Raleigh takes his mouth from Mako's skin, he leans over a little, bends to the side a little. Chuck meets him halfway, and they kiss, mouth on mouth. By mutual consensus, they slide off the edge of the tub, and Raleigh turns Chuck so that he is kneeling by the edge of the tub, facing Mako. Raleigh positions himself behind Chuck. While the tub fills again, Raleigh finds the lubricant he keeps tucked away in a discreet place near the tub. One finger. Two, up to the second knuckle. Three. Chuck knows to keep his knees apart and breathe out and relax. Mako finishes undressing and bends down again. She kisses Chuck again, then Raleigh._ _

__Before sliding into the hot water, Mako turns on the heating elements that run under the tile floor, so that it won't be cold on their knees._ _

__..._ _

__Long afterwards, Chuck tells Raleigh about how, in the passage out from the Central Planets, he would sneak down to the smuggler's compartment where they had put Mako. It was small, barely large enough for them to be in there at the same time, especially with all the scanner shielding that the Chois installed: he and Mako would curl up around each other and sleep. It was the only way Chuck actually slept soundly through the night._ _

__In the more immediate afterwards, they sleep together in the wide bed in Raleigh's quarters, Chuck on his side, Mako curled against his left side, with Raleigh spooned behind her. In the morning, they go down to the canteen for breakfast, and Holiday has a priceless pin in her hair; her parents are sleeping late, and Max drools on her feet. Stacker and Herc aren't up either, and Chuck comes back from checking coordinates and traffic information and finds Raleigh sitting with Holiday on his right. Mako comes back from the food warmer, hands Chuck his bar, and sits down next to Raleigh. Chuck hesitates, but sits down on the other side of Mako, on her left._ _

__..._ _

__Seven days later, _Jaeger_ picks up a pair of paying passengers: Vanessa and Hermann Gottlieb. They have a crate that they want Chuck to be careful loading. _ _

__The crate turns out to be a cryogenic pod containing Newt Geiszler, a fellow ex-researcher also on the run from the Academy._ _

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Fuck me, that's a relatively happy ending. AT LEAST UNTIL CHUCK-AS-WASH BITES IT IN THE MOVIE OR SOMETHING.
> 
> 2\. Thanks go to [wantonlywindswept](http://wantonlywindswept.tumblr.com/) for putting together [the original photoset](http://quigonejinn.tumblr.com/post/62503286795/pr-firefly-fusion-gifset-big-damn-heroes) and providing [encouragement](http://quigonejinn.tumblr.com/post/62747284280/firefly-fusion-gifset-war-stories) and the mindblowing idea of RALEIGH AS A REGISTERED COMPANION STILL SHRIEKING ALWAYS SHRIEKING. 
> 
> 3\. [saellys](http://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys) basically provided motivation for me to finish the last fucking thousand word stretch by bribing me with A+++ Herc/Mako AU porn. SHE IS A CHAMP. Also, the whole bit with the protein cake is legit from her. In fact, a lot of the decent ideas in this are from her. Sixty percent of this, no lie, was written while screaming with [Vongchild](<a%20href=), so the good ideas in this that aren't saellys's idea are probably hers, except the idea of Herc and Mako going in using elite-ass hand signals left over from Herc's days cracking Browncoat heads is legit from [harrietvane](http://harrietvane.tumblr.com).
> 
> 4\. I'M PROBABLY FORGETTING PEOPLE IF I JACKED YOUR IDEA AND AM FAILING TO GIVE YOU CREDIT TELL ME
> 
> 5\. Yeah, I know, this has a lot of handwaving about the fine details of the Firefly extended universe. WHAT DO YOU MEAN A SERIES 4 FIREFLY CLASS VEHICLE HASN'T BEEN BUILT YET TECHNICALLY? BUT I NEED TO FIT THIS MANY PEOPLE ON THE DAMN THING. 
> 
> 6\. I do not have a good reason for why Tendo's kid is a girl, besides the fact that I didn't know that the artbook identified the kid he has with Alison as a son? I found that out after I'd already made Holiday a character in my own head, so yeah, you know. 
> 
> 7\. This was written while listening to [Short Change Hero](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1QUZzeZoPQ) on loop. I may also have spent a lot of time yelling the line from Woodkid's "The Golden Age" where it's like WE ARE A FAMILY NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAAAAAAAAAAAY~~~~


End file.
